Now My Spider's Dead
by shaping-up-to-be-pretty-ood
Summary: The Doctor has just come back from the Singing Towers of Darillium, and he's absolutely heartbroken over the loss of his wife. Clara simply cannot stand to see him in so much pain. (11/River and 11/Clara, no bashing of either woman!)


"How did it go?" Clara whispered softly when the Doctor knocked on her door again. It had only been an hour since he had left her back at home, but she knew it had been several days for him. Possibly more. The man had just lost his wife and was in a pretty terrible state about it.

"Exactly as she described," he sighed. Holding out his hand for her to grasp, he led her back to the TARDIS. She chose not to say anything about his bloodshot eyes or the stain of deep red lipstick on his cheek. It wasn't fun to think that even though she had only met River a few times, she would never see the outrageous woman again, never poke fun at the Doctor's hats with her anymore. She would never walk into the console room to find them running around flipping switches together and shouting flirty insults about one another's flying skills.

"Where do you want to go?" His voice held no enthusiasm in the slightest, and it stabbed through Clara like a red-hot pike. She enjoyed being around him so much because of his spontaneity and youthfullness. But she couldn't just leave him alone in a time like this.

"Somewhere calm... And relaxing... Like a Buddhist monastery. I hear monasteries are nice." A bracing smile lit up her face when he met her eyes.

Suddenly it seemed a lot better to have someone to share his heartache with.

"I know how you feel," she whispered quietly. "Having someone you love taken from you is always horrible."

"I knew it was coming. Ever since I met her. That's what she's doing now, she's taking the expedition to that infernal _Library_ and she's going to have to deal with nine-hundred year old, know-it-all me who'll absolutely _shatter _her heart into a million tiny pieces, and then she'll_ die._ Right in front of me. It's like... Well, it's like being a fly caught in a web, but the spider's dead. I struggled against it first; I didn't want to fall in love with her, the pain of Rose was too fresh on my hearts. But gradually I accepted it. I fell in love with the woman who was the baby of my best friends that I failed to save and then married to fix time itself. That woman has done impossible things. She was part Time Lord. Regenerated twice, first time being because she was poisoned after we had seen her face when we ought not have, and the second time being when Hitler shot her. She murdered me, but then gave all of her remaining regenerations to save me. We've fought more monsters together than I can count, and she broke time to save me again. She is the very _reason_ her own parents got married in the first place, she is literally responsible for her own existence, and grew up right alongside her parents. Imagine that. Being your parents' best friend when you were children. She shot down a ship full of Silents when she thought I wasn't looking. I saw everything on the scanner, and _my god,_ she was so gorgeous while she was spinning around firing beam after beam, her hair aloft around her... Like an angel. So I accepted my fate, I definitely loved that woman to the end of the universe. Which we accidentally caused anyway. But now that I'm completely open to loving her, to the fly's death, she's gone, the spider's not coming back, but I'm still ensnared in the web, gauranteed to starve to death before I get free."

"There's something poetic to that." Clara's voice was hardly audible, and she maintained eye contact with the floor. "But I won't leave you. Doctor, you've got to understand that I'm here for you now. You, me and the snog box, as ghastly rude as she is, we're in it for the long haul."

A large hand rested against her cheek and drew her gaze upward, to be met with the teary Time Lord's smile. "I know. I'm ever so happy about it, too." He pulled her into a warm hug, nearly picking her up off her feet because of the height difference between the two of them.

"We're going to run, you and me."

**A/N: Okay, I swear that is not what I meant to happen! It wasn't supposed to be that sad. Ugh, what am I talking about, River dying is tragic and traumatic no matter how I write it. The part about the fly and the spider comes from the song Always by Panic! At The Disco, as I think that the entire song is a great description of River and the Doctor's complicated timey wimey relationship. (Actually, Panic! has a lot of great songs for writing Doctor Who fics.) This is a plausible scenario since the possibility of The Name Of The Doctor being the last episode to feature River alive is becoming more and more apparent in the new episodes. I mean, come on, RED SETTINGS ALREADY?! Argh. ;-; This also neatens up my internal conflict for shipping Doctor/Clara... I mean, it's still a little weird, but I think that Clara is the type of girl who would provide support to the Doctor right after he's lost his last Pond, and they're already starting to look like a love story. And I'm a firm believer that the man can love more than one person if he bloody well wants to! Look at Elizabeth I and Reinette, for example... That was during the Rose-love era. So yeah, 11/River is my OTP but 11/Clara is just so dang cute. v.v (And on the poisoning Melody part, I can understand if this was what Kovarian would've done since they saw her face and she knew she was going to regenerate blah blah, trying to use the element of surprise with Mels... And there's no canon reasoning behind her regeneration in New York.)**


End file.
